Against Fantology
Barry Smith
Department of Philosophy, University at Buffalo and IFOMIS, Saarbrücken
phismith@buffalo.edu
Forthcoming in J. Marek and E. M. Reicher (eds.), Experience and Analysis, Vienna: öbv&hpt, 2005
1. Introduction
A dark force haunts much of what is most admirable in the philosophy of the last
one hundred years. It consists, briefly put, in the doctrine to the effect that one can
arrive at a correct ontology by paying attention to certain superficial (syntactic)
features of first-order predicate logic as conceived by Frege and Russell. More
specifically, fantology is a doctrine to the effect that the key to the ontological
structure of reality is captured syntactically in the ‘Fa’ (or, in more sophisticated
versions, in the ‘Rab’) of first-order logic, where ‘F’ stands for what is general in
reality and ‘a’ for what is individual. Hence “fantology”. Because predicate logic
has exactly two syntactically different kinds of referring expressions – (F), (G),
(R), etc., and (a), (b), (c), etc. – so reality must consist of exactly two
correspondingly different kinds of entity: the general (properties, concepts) and
the particular (things, objects), the relation between these two kinds of entity
being revealed in the predicate-argument structure of atomic formulas in firstorder logic.
Fantology is a twentieth-century variant of linguistic Kantianism, or in other
words of the doctrine that the structure of language (here: of a particular logical
language) is the key to the structure of reality. Classical fantologists were Frege,
Russell and the Wittgenstein of the Tractatus, yet the work of almost all
twentieth-century analytical philosophers bears traces of fantological influence,
though this influence is of course more notable in some circles (for instance
among the logical positivists in Vienna) than in others. Where the early
fantologists argued explicitly that first-order predicate logic mirrors reality,
present-day philosophers are marked by fantology only tacitly, through their use
of predicate logic and of ways of thinking associated therewith. David Armstrong
seems, in this respect, to be a border-line case.
The dark force of fantology has spread its tentacles also beyond the realm of
philosophy to embrace much of what goes on in computer science under headings
such as ‘knowledge representation’ and ‘conceptual modeling’. The full story of
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these influences must be left for another day, but for a preliminary accounting see
my (2004).
2. History
Many of the ontological doctrines which I associate with fantology in what
follows have recognizable roots in the work of philosophers such as Plato,
Leibniz, Locke, Kant, and Hume, whose ideas were of course formed well before
predicate logic was conceived by Frege. But it was, I suggest, the very success of
Frege’s project in the Begriffsschrift which led just these doctrines of just these
philosophers to be taken up within the canon of analytical philosophy (a branch or
mode of philosophy which was, after all, for a long time conspicuously
uninterested in its own philosophical past).
The language of predicate logic is richly expressive, and I hasten to emphasize
from the start that it is of course possible to use predicate logic in one’s
philosophical work without falling victim to any of the adverse effects of
fantology. (I shall indeed conclude with one example of how predicate logic can
be used in order to thwart these very effects.) My goal is thus not to criticize
predicate logic. Rather, it is to bring forward examples of the ways in which
predicate logic has been standardly used in order to build a new sort of tunnel
through the history of post-Fregean philosophy. My remarks should accordingly
be understood in this historical light. If Frege is the grandfather of analytical
philosophy, then it is the influence in ever widening circles of Frege’s logic which
has confirmed his special place in the analytic-philosophical pantheon. Frege’s
signal achievement lies in his having inaugurated the era of logical rigor – to the
extent that we can now all agree that logical rigor is an indispensable requirement
of all good philosophy. But this signal achievement was for a long time marred
through its association with an overestimation of the power of a relatively
simplistic type of logico-linguistic analysis to resolve ontological problems.
Exposing some of the effects of this overestimation should allow us to understand
the development of analytical philosophy in a new way, and to bring to light
aspects of this development which are normally hidden.
3. The Secret Doctrine
Fantology is a doctrine that rarely dares to speak its name. (That fantology should
be conceived as a secret doctrine is indeed one reading of the concluding sentence
of Wittgenstein’s Tractatus.) When Wittgenstein gives voice to the doctrine, it
reads like this:
Most of the propositions and questions of philosophers arise from our
failure to understand the logic of our language. (4.003)
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Propositions show the logical form of reality. They display it. (4.121)
Thus one proposition ‘fa’ shows that the object a occurs in its sense, two
propositions ‘fa’ and ‘ga’ show that the same object is mentioned in both
of them. If two propositions contradict one another, then their structure
shows it; the same is true if one of them follows from the other. And so
on. (4.1211)
The propositions of logic describe the scaffolding of the world, or rather
they represent it. They have no ‘subject-matter’. They presuppose that
names have meaning and elementary propositions sense; and that is their
connection with the world. It is clear that something about the world must
be indicated by the fact that certain combinations of symbols – whose
essence involves the possession of a determinate character – are
tautologies. This contains the decisive point. (6.124)
The exploration of logic means the exploration of everything that is
subject to law. And outside logic everything is accidental. (6.3)
Just as the only necessity that exists is logical necessity, so too the only
impossibility that exists is logical impossibility. (6.375)
Compare also Russell: ‘Philosophy, if what has been said is correct, becomes
indistinguishable from logic as that word has now come to be used.’ (1917) And:
‘logic is concerned with the real world just as truly as zoology, though with its
more abstract and general features.’ (1919).
4. The Spreadsheet Ontology
We can gain some impression of what more recent fantological philosophy looks
like by considering what Armstrong was once pleased to call his “Spreadsheet
Ontology” (see Armstrong 2004, a work published only in French).
F
G H
a
x
b
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x
c
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d
I
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K L M N O P
x
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Q R
T U ...
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S
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3
e
x
x
f
x
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g
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h
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x
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i
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j
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...
Figure 1: Armstrong’s Spreadsheet Ontology
Reality, we are to suppose, is made up of concrete individuals (a, ...) plus abstract
‘properties’ or ‘attributes’ (F, ...). The rows of Armstrong’s spreadsheet (see
Figure 1) then corresponding to the individuals, the columns to the properties.
When the spreadsheet has been filled in completely – a task which Armstrong
seems to have believed could be left to the physicists of the future – then we will
be able to read off for every object a list of its properties and for every property a
list of the objects to which it applies, and in this way gain a complete assay of
reality.
At the time when he advanced his Spreadsheet Ontology, Armstrong seems to
have believed not only that such an assay is at least in principle possible, but
further that its provision is the very goal of physics in its march towards future
perfection. Wittgenstein’s Tractatus, too, of course, expresses a vision along
similar lines, his elementary propositions corresponding to the cells of the
spreadsheet after the latter has been modified to allow some extra room for
relations. David Lewis and the Carnap of the state descriptions enrich the vision
by having many spreadsheets, one for each ‘world’, the worlds themselves
enjoying a stunning mathematical elegance in virtue of the fact that they are
identified with sets of propositions of simple (Fa, Rab, etc.) forms.
5. The Picture Theory
Fantology sometimes takes the form of a thesis according to which the language
of standard predicate logic can serve the formulation of the truths of natural
science in a uniquely illuminating way (its syntax mirrors, after all, the very
structures in reality which such truths represent). So Quine, with his doctrine
according to which the ontological commitments of a theory become evident only
when the theory has been regimented in fantological fashion.
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A similar thesis already underlies the picture theory of the Tractatus, where
the syntax of first-order predicate logic is, as one says, a “great mirror”
(Feibleman 1958). It underlies the logical atomism of Bertrand Russell, including
the central thesis according to which all form is logical form – a thesis which, be
it noted, leaves no room for a discipline of formal ontology as something separate
from formal logic.
In this connection it is worth bearing in mind that the term ‘formal ontology’
was originally coined by Husserl (1913/21) to signify that branch of philosophy
which deals with the interconnections of things, with objects and properties, parts
and wholes, relations and collectives – as contrasted with formal logic, which
deals with the interconnections of truths, with consistency and validity,
disjunction and entailment, ‘and’ and ‘not’. There is no a priori reason to suppose
that these two families of interconnections should be identical. Both are ‘formal’
– which means (as Husserl sees it) that they are domain-independent structures
realizable in principle in all material spheres of reality. The mereologist’s ‘part
of’ reflects a formal-ontological structure in light of the fact that there is no
restriction on the sorts of objects which can enter into relations of part to whole.
‘Or’, similarly, reflects a formal-logical structure, because the relation of
disjunction can join together assertions without restriction on their content. In
other respects, however, the two sorts of structure are radically distinct – yet
fantology rides roughshod over the differences between them.
There are two central components to the formal ontology Husserl himself
presented in his Third Logical Investigation: the theory of part and whole (or
mereology), which has received some considerable attention in recent years
(Simons 1987), and the theory of dependence – that is to say the theory of those
links between entities of different types in virtue of which entities of one type
cannot, as a matter of necessity, exist without some further entity of another,
different type (Johansson 2004). These necessary relations between discrete
existences obtain most conspicuously between entities – for example processes or
qualities on the one hand and their bearers on the other – which enjoy different
ways of existing in reality. The neglect of necessary dependence relations in
fantological circles flows from the fact that such distinct ways of being were
themselves commonly neglected. This neglect in turn is one consequence of the
fantologists’ assumption that ‘existence’ is univocal – it is in every case a
property of what Frege called concepts or functions – and is captured in the ‘.’
And if existence is analyzed as a property of concepts, so supervenience is
analyzed (e.g. in Kim (1984)) as a relation which has concepts as its relata.
6. The Special Case of Mathematics
The term ‘formal’ is of course used also in another sense – corresponding to the
use of the term ‘symbolic’ in the phrase ‘symbolic logic’. Fantology can in this
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light also be formulated as a doctrine to the effect that formal ontology is properly
included within the domain of symbolic logic as this was understood by Frege or
Russell. The historical background to this doctrine is, I believe, in the apparent
successes of early analytical philosophy in the domain of the philosophy of
mathematics, which seemed to many in the years following the publication of
Principia Mathematics to lend a great deal of support to the proposition that,
when once we have fixed on a proper symbolism for the expression of the truths
of mathematics, then no further mathematical work would remain to be done.
Wittgenstein generalized this assumption: when once we have fixed on a proper
symbolism for the expression of the truths of natural science, no further work for
ontology will remain to be done.
Some early fantologists went still further in embracing an even stronger thesis
according to which all necessary truths – and thus, on some accounts, all the
truths of philosophy – could be analyzed as truths of logic. In the Vienna circle,
for example, it was working dogma that the successes achieved by Frege and
Russell in reducing truths of mathematics to truths of logic would inevitably be
repeated elsewhere, in a march towards total victory of logical reduction in all
domains of inquiry, so that it would one day be possible to read off without
restriction the structure of reality from the symbolism of logic.
7. First-Order Logic as Characteristica Universalis
The language of first-order logic – especially in the form it was given in Principia
Mathematica – thus came to represent the rebirth of the old Leibnizian idea of a
universal characteristic. But while Frege and Russell (and Whitehead) did indeed
successfully demonstrate that this language may lay some claim to the power of a
characteristic when it comes to the formulation of many of the propositions of
mathematics, it is by now surely evident that it can lay no such claim in regard to
other domains.
One reason why fantology works so well in mathematics is because
mathematical entities do not exist in time and space (this is why mathematics is a
domain in relation to which a Platonistic ontology has much to be said in its favor,
and why mathematics is a domain in which it may even make sense to identify
necessity with logical necessity and law with logical law). When philosophers
have turned their methods to the necessary relations in other, non-mathematical
domains, then fantological reductions have remained beyond their grasp. The
logical positivists’ expectation that it would be possible to demonstrate the logical
nature of such necessary truths as ‘Nothing can be red and green all over’ were
uniformly dashed. But this failure went largely unnoticed, to the degree that many
continued to assume that the needed reductions had indeed been successfully
obtained. The truths of casual necessity received a different treatment. So closely
did some adhere themselves to the doctrine according to which all necessity is
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logical necessity that in order to save the good name of fantology they saw fit,
when applying this doctrine to the realm of causality, to embrace the nuclear
option of Humeanism. Causal relations would break the bounds of fantology.
Hence, causal relations do not exist.
8. All Generality Belongs to the Predicate
Consider some typical sentences of science:
Action and reaction are equal and opposite.
The electron has a negative charge.
The ribosome is the subcellular unit responsible for protein synthesis.
The heart is a part of the cardiovascular system.
Here nominal expressions are used as a matter of course to refer to what is
general in reality. In the syntax of first-order logic on the favored fantological
interpretation, in contrast, all generality belongs to the predicate: the ‘a’ in ‘Fa’
(and thus the ‘x’ in ‘Fx’) is a mere (meaningless) name, a matter of pure
denotation.
Note that, as is made clear already by many of the examples used by Frege
himself, nothing in logic prevents the use of names to refer to ideal or general
objects, and nothing in logic says that names are meaningless or that they can
refer only to individual objects. Rather, these assumptions are the result of a
philosophical interpretation.
9. Reality is Made of Atoms (‘Bare Particulars’)
Those advocates of fantology who allow only logically simple names are then led
by the doctrine which identifies ontological form with logical form in the
direction of one or other atomistic conception of reality. This atomism is manifest
in Armstrong’s Spreadsheet Ontology and by his repeated appeals to the basic
truths of some future perfected physics. But it is demonstrated most starkly in the
Tractatus, which denies that there exist complex objects at levels of granularity
above the level of the absolutely simple substances to which the logically proper
names of the Tractatus are supposed to refer. Wittgenstein seems, indeed, to deny
all ontological complexity at levels of granularity above that of the states of
affairs which such objects go to form.
Fantology has of course proved conducive not only to atomistic doctrines but
also to other, associated forms of reductionism and eliminativism, including
Russell’s view to the effect that proper names refer to sense data. Wittgenstein’s
assumption that the effect that all elementary propositions are logically
independent of each other likewise consolidated a resistance to holistic views
about the structure of reality (thus to patterns, laws, systems). Fantologically
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inspired philosophy has thus also faced difficulties in doing justice in its theories
to the objects of biology. Where fantology departs from atomism at all, it has
normally embraced doctrines of complexity powered by set theory – and of course
the central role of set theory in analytical philosophy itself has fantological roots.
Alternatively, it has seen virtue in theories of ‘bundles’ – resting again on the
assumption that the key to good ontology lies in breaking down reality into
smallest bits.
10. ... and Sets
When applied as the exclusive tool of ontology set theory amounts to the
reduction of all complexity to cumulative combinations of zero or more
Urelemente. Set theory can in fact be identified as a general theory of those
mathematical structures which arise when objects (of whatever sort) are
conceived as being unified together ad libitum on successively higher levels, each
object serving as member or element of objects on the next higher level. The
problem is that, in many spheres which we might wish to subject to ontological
analysis, no candidate basic level of Urelemente can be identified. In some
spheres, moreover, there is no unidirectional (upward) growth of complexity
generated by simple combination. The pitch, timbre and loudness of a musical
tone, for example, are not Urelemente which can exist in separation from one
another and somehow become combined together in the context of the larger
whole.
A further problem with set theory is that it deals with combination per
accidens – drawing no distinction of structure between, say, the set of enzymes,
the set of planets in the solar system, and the set of persons whose surnames end
in ‘E’. It places numbers and popes, molecules and galaxies together in
combination and thereby fosters a maximally promiscuous use of the term
‘object’ which has been detrimental to the advance of ontology in analytic
philosophical circles in ways too little appreciated.
It seems to me to be an open question whether there is any counter veiling
theoretical interest from the perspective of ontology to the possibility of such ad
libitum, universally applicable, and thus necessarily bland, unification. For the
concrete varieties of complexity which in fact confront us in our dealings with
reality are subject always to quite subtle sorts of constraints, constraints which
vary from one type of entity to another. We are, outside the special contexts of
mathematical set theory, not interested in ad libitum collections, after all – not
even when we are making lists. Rather we are interested in collections of objects
of given sorts and in given contexts or locations.
A further problem – a problem rarely addressed by those who would use set
theory as a tool of ontology – is that sets as defined by the pertinent axiomatic
theories are abstract entities. They are timeless; they do not change (the set-
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structure is implicitly defined by certain axioms which are timelessly true). The
friend of sets is thereby left with the problem of how he is to connect up the
abstracta he countenances on the side of sets with those real concreta with which
they are in different ways associated, and even Maddy (1997), who comes closest
to providing a solution for this problem, concentrates rather on the
epistemological aspects of the propositions of mathematical set theory.
Those who use the jargon of sets in non-philosophical disciplines – for
example in classifications of soil types or of diseases – commonly suppose that
they can rely on set theory to provide the needed formal support for their work.
They do not recognize that the mathematical theory of sets deals with sets as
abstract entities artificially removed from the realm of time and space. This is
clear where the sets in question are pure sets (sets built out of the empty set as
basis), with no admixture of Urelemente at all. But it holds even where the sets in
question – for example the set of all items of furniture in a given room – have
physical objects as their elements. For the mathematical set-forming operator has
the peculiar effect of sealing off real-world entities from the vagaries of time and
space. The set {Socrates} exists (in the timeless sense appropriate to abstract
mathematical entities) even though Socrates himself passed out of existence long
ago.
11. Particulars are Unknowable
It is not only all generality, on the fantological view, that is confined to the
predicate, but also (at least on some versions of fantology) all connotation, all
meaning. Names are mere ciphers – a matter of pure denotation. Thus if all truths
are to be capable of being expressed in predicate-logical terms, then this implies a
noumenal view of what the classical fantologists liked to call “bare particulars”,
an outcome in fact explicitly embraced by Quine (Oderberg 2005). And, if (as on
some standard fantological views) universals are identified as mere sets of
particulars – or with functions between such sets of particulars and what some
fantologists are pleased to call ‘worlds’ – then this implies a noumenal view of
universals, too. We cannot express in our theories what particulars, or universals,
are like; at best we can capture only a certain structure (or pattern or net or mesh)
which reality somehow realizes. We cannot know what numbers are like, because
even in second-order Peano arithmetic we cannot justify identifying the natural
numbers with any specific omega sequence.
In the hands of some, the formal limitations on our capacity to specify such
structures univocally (for example as implied by the Löwenheim-Skolem result)
are held (incredibly) to be a sign of a psychological incapacity on our part to
understand the corresponding objects. Here again (and now for spurious technical
reasons) fantology connives to Kantian conclusions.
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In fantological philosophy of natural science, the world itself is unknowable.
At best we can appeal in Neokantian style to physics as it will exist in some never
quite realized future state of epistemological perfection – a physics in which all of
the differential equations will somehow have disappeared. Fantology thus implies,
as in the hands of Carnap, a noumenal view of science.
12. Predication is Functional Application
Another strand in the fantological doctrine is the thesis according to which, in
order to understand monadic properties it suffices to understand monadic
predication. Frege held that when we assert, for example, that John is wise, then
we are not ascribing to John some quality (of wisdom). Rather, we are applying a
certain function from objects to truth values, and asserting that the value of this
function for John as argument is a certain designated object called ‘the true’. In
this way Frege’s object/function distinction rides roughshod over two traditional
ontological distinctions, between substance and property and between particular
and universal.
On more traditional accounts of predication, qualities like wisdom or hunger
or temperature can be coherently applied only to entities of certain restricted sorts.
One important corollary of Frege’s account of predication, however, is that it
applies indiscriminately to entities of all kinds. It thereby yields a single,
beautifully elegant, unified (and bland) account of properties and predication,
which extends indiscriminately to entities of all sorts – in spite of the fact that
there is nothing ontologically in common between, say, the evenness of the
number 2 and the negative charge of an electron. This allows Frege himself to
build nonsense truths like ‘The square root of Napoleon’s mother is the false.’ In
this way, however, the generality and rigor of Frege’s unified theory is bought at
the price of ontological obfuscation.
A further problem with Frege’s theory becomes apparent when we consider its
application to the case of relations. That a stands in relation R to b is parsed by
Frege as meaning: the function R when applied to the ordered pair <a, b> as
argument yields the true as value. In virtue of what, however, does this latter
proposition hold, if not in virtue of the existence of some relation (in the more
traditional, properly ontological sense) between a and b.
Occasionally Platonistic doctrines are offered, for example by Bealer,
Butchvarov, Hochberg or Plantinga (see Menzel (1993)) as alternatives to the
Fregean account of predication. Such doctrines are however still too closely
wedded to the ‘Fa’ analysis, so that they, too, have gone hand in hand with many
of the simplifications otherwise characteristic of the fantologicla approach.
13. The Vanishing Copula
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The most important of these simplifications is the rejection of the venerable
Aristotelian distinction between two kinds of predication:
in the category of substance
John is a human being
Henry is an ox
in the category of accident
John is hungry
Henry is awake
The difference here turns on the fact that, if John is a human being, then he is a
human being at every time at which he exists, and not for accidental reasons but
because it is, as one says, part of John’s essence that he is a human being. If, on
the other hand, Henry is awake, then he will cease to be awake at some time in the
future. This distinction reflects what is, for Aristotle and for his successors, a
fundamental ontological distinction, between what a substance is (its essence),
and how it is (the accidents which accrue to it) at some given point in time.
Substances and accidents are for Aristotle categorically distinct kinds of
particulars.
For Frege and for his fantologist successors, this distinction has become
invisible: the copula, on which the distinction rests, has become bundled into the
predicate (Oderberg 2005), which is treated syntactically always in the same
uniform kind of way. This implies in turn that the fantologists have little room in
their thinking for the traditional distinction between property universals and kind
universals, just as they have little room for the notion of essence. Here again the
nuclear option is preferred – the idea being that it would be possible to save the
fantological doctrine by denying the existence of those entities which cause it
problems. Many heirs of the fantological world view have in this way found it
possible to avoid the problems raised for their doctrines by apparent examples of
true predications in the category of substance by denying the existence of
substances.
14. All Particulars are Bare Particulars
For the classical fantologist, all generality belongs to the predicate, all
particularity belongs to the name. From this it follows that analytical philosophers
were until relatively recently reluctant to admit into their ontologies tropes or
individual accidents or events or actions or other entities falling outside the two
privileged categories of property and object. Of the four corners of Aristotle’s
ontological square (see Figure 2), the classical fantologists have accordingly
admitted only two.
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Substantial
Accidental
Universal
Second substance
man
cat
ox
Second accident
headache
sun-tan
dread
Particular
First substance
this man
this cat
this ox
First accident
this headache
this sun-tan
this dread
Figure 2: Aristotle’s Ontological Square (simplified from Angelelli 1967; see also Lowe 2002).
If John has a headache, then the fantological assay of this fact – be it a matter of
functional application, or of ascription to an object of a general property –
involves no appeal to anything like the headache which John has, which has
lasted for two hours, and which he is attempting to cure by taking aspirin.
15. A Peculiar Insensitivity to Time
Because fantologists think it fitting to deal with predications about empirically
existing objects in just the same way that they deal with predications about
mathematical objects, this means that – because it is predications of the latter sort
which wear the ontological trousers – they have developed no clear way of
dealing with time. Fantologists such as Carnap were content to conceive the
passage of time in terms of a sequence of static worlds, one for each time, in
which all that is dynamic has been carefully eliminated.
The predicate logical ‘Fa’ had its origins, after all, in the work of Frege, who
was concerned first of all with the truths of mathematics. And Frege’s logic does
indeed work very well, in its way, for the formulation of many types of
mathematical truths. When it comes to truths about things marked by change,
however, then it needs to be extended by some sort of new machinery.
The three alternative ways of doing this within a still recognizable predicatelogical framework are by now well known (see e.g. Lowe 2002a, p. 43f.). ‘F holds
of a at t’ can be parsed in three ways:
(1) the property F holds-at-t of object a (the copula is indexed by times);
(2) the property F is a relation between object a and time t;
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(3) the property F holds of a new special entity called ‘at’or ‘a-at-t’ (an
object stage or phase or slice).
That none of these alternatives for representing time has established itself as
victor over the others turns on the fact that each involves a heavy price.
The first, which is sometimes called the adverbial solution, involves too great
a departure from fantological orthodoxy – holding is no longer capable of being
interpreted as functional application in the standard mathematical sense; rather it
comes to signify something more like inherence or exemplification as conceived
by Aristotelians. Indeed Lowe sees it as understandable why alternative (1)
“should have been overlooked, at least by philosophers trained to think in terms of
the categories of modern quantification or predicate logic, as it is called. For such
logic simply has no place for adverbs.” (2002a, p. 47)
The second seeks to simulate the temporal nature of holding by viewing each
contingent property as a relation to a time. The problem here is that the result
contravenes almost everything that we know about properties of almost all
familiar kinds.
The third represents, once again, a nuclear option. It amounts to sacrificing
three-dimensional enduring entities for reasons which have to do (at least in part)
with the desire to hold on to a trusted syntax. On this third option you yourself do
not exist; rather there exists only a sequence of youish phases in continuous
temporal succession. (For arguments against such views see Inwagen 2000.)
Nowadays, philosophers who wish to hold on to the framework of first-order
logic in order to formulate their ontological views often advance one or other
four-dimensionalist position which denies the existence of three-dimensional
(endurant) objects but replaces them not by phases, or stages, but rather by fourdimensional (perdurant) processes. There is not Bill Clinton, but rather a certain
process-of-a-Bill-Clintonizing-sort. This allows the four-dimensionalist to hold on
to a timeless version of first-order logic without the need for special temporal
variables or operators, since all the denizens of the four-dimensional process
plenum have all their properties in timeless fashion. The problem with this view,
again, is that it implies that you and I, our cells and organs, the buildings and
cities in which we live, do not exist.
16. Poor Treatment of Relations
The doctrine according to which relations are sets of ordered tuples, while it falls
outside the syntactic repertoire of fantology that is here our primary concern, is
yet clearly part of the same stable of views and has similar consequences in the
form of denials of ontological distinctions hitherto (and for good reasons)
accepted as a matter of course.
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The tradition found it necessary to distinguish between several radically
different types of relations. First there are real material relational endurants, like
love or hate, and other relational qualities (for example Jonathan’s knowledge of
Greek), which, like endurant entities in general, change in different ways while
preserving their identity through time. There are real material relational events,
like wars and conversations, kicks and kisses, relational entities which call for a
treatment along roughly Davidsonian lines, like events of every other sort. There
are family relations, such as is consanguineous with or is the brother of, and there
are comparatives such as is taller than or is warmer than.
When binary relations are identified with sets of ordered pairs, then all of
these putatively distinct types of relations become identified. What is the adicity
of your headache (a relation between your consciousness and various processes
taking place in an around your brain)? What is the adicity of the Battle of
Waterloo? Does John’s being in love with Mary or being the cousin of Mary,
consist in his being, with Mary, a term in an ordered pair belonging to a certain
abstract entity in the realm of sets? Which analysis, here, comes closer to
reproducing the order of ontological primacy?
Of course it is possible in various ways to resist the identification of relations
with sets of tuples in a predicate logical framework. One can insist that, while
standard model theory typically employs such sets of tuples as assignments for
relational predicates, this does not mean that such sets of tuples must be part of
the intended interpretations of theories formulated in the predicate logical
language.
Note, too, that at least one relation – the relation of set-membership itself –
must remain unamenable to an analysis in terms of the relations-are-sets-of-tuples
view. This relation is, in David Lewis’s terms, a mystery. (Lewis 1991) From the
perspective of many adherents of fantological semantics (inter alia in the realm of
computer science), we can understand a theory only when we have provided a settheoretic semantics for that theory and proved consistency, completeness, etc.
Clearly such a doctrine can provide no help in understanding set theory itself.
According to Russell’s History of Western Philosophy the introduction of the
new style ‘Rab’ was seen as having initiated a revolution in the treatment of
relations and as representing a genuine advance in our understanding which
allowed its adherents to overcome the problems which had confronted earlier
thinkers, such as Aristotle and the scholastics, who (as Russell says) had been led
by their own subject-predicate logic to identify relations with monadic relational
properties. The ‘Rab’ was seen as having freed us also from the errors of those,
such as Spinoza or Leibniz or Bradley (or Hegel), whose failure to understand
relations had led them to embrace monistic or monadological doctrines that were
an offence to common sense. As we have seen, however, when applied to the
14
different types of relations with which we are pre-theoretically familiar, the Rab
account faces considerable difficulties of its own.
There are many other doctrines which have been found attractive by those
who fall within the gravitational field of fantology. It is fantology which lent
credence to Kim’s doctrine (1976), according to which an event consists in an
individual’s exemplifying a property at a time, a doctrine which assimilates real
change to Cambridge change. And indeed, with its reduction of relations to sets of
ordered tuples, fantology is likewise ex officio not in a position to resist the
assimilation of properties (such as hardness or shape) to Cambridge properties
(such as being thought about).
17. Booleanism
Another problem with fantology, at least on some variants, concerns its treatment
of properties as inhabiting a realm structured by Boolean combination. If F and G
are properties, then so also are F, FG, FG, FG, FG, FG, and so on – as
if establishing the properties in reality was a matter not of empirical science but of
logic. (See Meixner 1992, for a particularly severe strain of the Boolean
fantological orthodoxy, and Newman 1992 for an alternative view.)
This Booleanism – which is properly at home not in ontology but rather in
logic or mathematics – derives from Frege’s assimilation of predicates to
sentences via his notion of unsaturatedness. Predicates are, as one says, ‘open
sentences’. At the same time they correspond to what is general in reality
(somewhat confusingly called by Frege ‘concepts’). The sleight of hand here turns
on the fact that what is general in reality is hereby brought within the realm of
operators such as and or not – operators which are essentially linguistic. There are
indeed some who think that we can read off the properties in reality by looking at
the language we use to talk about it. Kantians and relativists even find such
doctrines attractive for reasons which have nothing to do with any influence of
fantology. But they are, surely, doctrines which enjoy too many of the advantages
of theft over honest toil.
Frege’s idea led, by degrees, to a lazy use of the word ‘property’. (The
fantologist’s strong comprehension axiom asserts that there is a property
corresponding to every expressible formula with exactly one free variable.) In this
way, too, fantology came to be conducive to nominalism (for an ontologist,
surely, cannot take seriously properties like: being non-identical to Socrates,
being such that 2 + 2 = 4, being a unicorn unless sleeping, being either not a
silverfish or not magnetically charged, being green if examined before a certain
date). Set theory, too, of course, is marked by a Booleanism of this sort – a
Booleanism which shares part of the responsibility for Russell’s paradox.
Booleanism is in this way responsible also for the phobia of quantification over
properties/universals (for no dangers need arise through such quantification in the
15
absence of Boolean combination). In this respect, too, Booleanism is conducive to
nominalism.
The tradition surely had it right when it took for granted the thesis that the
question which simple and complex general expressions stand for properties or
universals in reality is a question to be decided in each case only on the basis of
special inquiries – for example on the part of natural science. So powerful is the
force of Booleanism, however, that even the valiant efforts of Armstrong to fight
against it with his ‘sparse’ or ‘non-abundant’ theory of universals (Armstrong
1978; see also Lewis 1983) are thus far still a minority taste among analytical
metaphysicians.
So powerful, indeed, is the solid wall of Booleanist orthodoxy in the
philosophy of the twentieth century that its penetration on the part of Armstrong
comes close to constituting a miracle of modern intellectual history. Note, though,
that this magnificent achievement did no more than bring him back to the point
where Aristotelians had been from the very start.
18. No Room for Dependent Continuants
Davidson, too, with his ontology of events, did much to break down fantological
orthodoxy. His quantificational analysis of sentences about occurrents (actions,
events) was an important step forward not least in the area where logic meets
linguistics: it meant that those linguists who had thus far been too heavily
influenced by fantology were finally able to deal coherently with verbs. As
analytical metaphysicians have in recent years increasingly turned their attention
to powers, qualities, roles, conditions, functions, dispositions, and so forth, they
have thereby extended the Davidson-style analysis of occurrents into the realm of
dependent continuants. Sadly it is still in too many quarters fashionable to talk
indiscriminately of “tropes” in this connection (reflecting, once again, the fact that
fantology encourages an undiscriminating representation of all entities not
belonging to the category of independent object). Tropes are individualized
properties – but properties as fantologically conceived, which means: properties
conceived through the running together of all that is expressed by means of the
‘Fa’ and the ‘Rab’.
For exactly as the classical fantologists made too few distinctions in the realm
of properties, so their trope-ontologist successors make too few distinctions in the
realm of dependent entities, not least in failing to distinguish clearly between
dependent continuants such as qualities, powers, functions, roles, dispositions,
and dependent occurrents such as actions and events (Grenon and Smith 2004).
When we do make such distinctions, then we arrive at a more adequate ontology,
which might be represented in the form of what we can call the Aristotelian
Ontological Sextet, as follows:
16
Independent
Continuant
Dependent
Continuant
Occurrent
(Process)
Universal
Second substance
man
cat
ox
Second quality
headache
sun-tan
dread
Second process
copulation
walking
thinking
Particular
First substance
this man
this cat
this ox
First quality
this headache
this sun-tan
this dread
First process
this copulation
this walking
this thinking
Figure 3: The Ontological Sextet
This more adequate ontology goes beyond Aristotle in embracing, in addition to,
individual and universal substances, also individual and universal qualities (as
well as functions, dispositions, etc.), and both individual and universal processes.
(See Figure 3.) Entities in these categories would be joined together by formal
relations such as instantiation, exemplification and participation, as well as by the
part relation (obtaining for example between the parts of a process and the
process whole), and by the realization relation (obtaining between a function and
the processes through which it is executed).
19. A New, Enhanced Davidsonianism
We can solve the problems of fantology in a number of ways. We can follow the
route taken by Leśniewski or Sommers and replace fantological logic with a term
logic owing more to the older logico-ontological tradition than to the postFregean logic of functional application. Or we can follow Wiggins in bringing the
copula back into predicate logic, or Gupta (1980) in developing a logic of
common nouns. Here, however, we concentrate on a still too little explored
alternative, which involves a minimal adjustment to the standard syntax of firstorder logic – but an adjustment which nonetheless protects us from its
fantological influence – effectively by eliminating the ‘F’ in ‘Fa’ and by radically
confining and reconceiving the range of substitution-instances of the ‘R’ in ‘Rab’.
We have already noted how, because of its roots in mathematics, Fregean
logic yields from within its own resources no satisfactory way of dealing with
time and change. Matters were improved in this respect through Davidson’s
treatment of events, and the idea here is that the latter can be generalized in a
radical way to solve the problems of fantology in one foul swoop.
17
First we expand still further the repertoire of types of entities over which our
variables range, in such a way that they embrace both particulars and universals in
all the six categories distinguished in our Ontological Sextet (and conceivably
also further groups of entities such as temporal instants or spatial regions not here
considered). Second, we eliminate all predicates of the ‘F’ and ‘R’ style, replacing
them with a small number of relational expressions, but confining ourselves to
formal ties which, like ‘=’, come with fixed interpretations.
Relations of the sorts we have in mind are represented in Figure 4, as follows:
Substantial universal
differentia of
Quality universal
Process universal
exemplifies
instantiates
instantiates
instantiates
has participant
Substantial
particular
Quality particular
inheres in
Process particular
Figure 4. Relations connecting the six different types of entities in the Ontological Sextet
Our restricted vocabulary for predicate logic might then contain a list of
predicates along the following lines:
=(x, y), for: x is identical to y
Part(x, y), for: individual x is part of individual y
Inst(x, y), for: individual x instantiates universal y
Inhere(x, y), for: individual x inheres in individual y
Exemp(x, y), for: individual x exemplifies property y
Dep(x, y), for: individual x depends for its existence on individual y
Is_a(x, y), for: universal x is a subkind of universal y
Precedes(x, y), for: individual process x precedes individual process y
Has_Participant(x, y), for: individual thing y participates in individual
occurrent x
Has_Agent(x, y), for: individual thing y is agent of individual
occurrent x
Realizes (x, y), for: individual process x realizes individual function y
18
‘John is wise’, in this vocabulary, becomes: Exemp(John, wisdom) – ‘wisdom’
here is the name of a universal. ‘John is a man’ becomes: Inst(John, man). ‘Man is
a subtype of animal’ becomes: Isa(man, animal), and so on. The vocabulary
allows us also to formulate a range of axioms governing the formal behavior of
the relations thereby distinguished, for example:
Realizes (x, y)  z (Dep (x, y)  Dep (y, z))
Exempt (x, y)  z (Inst(z, y)  Inhere(z, x))
The result is comparable to the vocabulary of set theory in the sense that there,
too, we have a restricted number (two) of relational predicates: = and , both of
which are formal, governed by a restricted number of axioms. But while the
language we are proposing has a vocabulary structurally very similar to that of set
theory, it differs radically in that the formal tie of set-theoretic membership itself
emanates from the fantological stable (and thus represents a brutal gliding over of
the distinction between logical and ontological form).
20. Predicates Do Not Represent
Our fundamental idea is that predicates (the standard predicates of first-order
logic fantologically conceived) do not represent. Even the formal predicates
which we allow in our vocabulary do not stand for anything. (They are to this
degree analogous to the logical constants as conceived by Wittgenstein.) Rather
they are what link together variable and constant terms which are those parts of
the syntax which do stand for something. The logical constants do not represent,
and nor, either, do the ontological constants.
Formal ties such as instantiates, part-of, connected-to, boundary-of are for
familiar Bradleyan reasons not extra ingredients of being. For if they were entities
in their own right then there would arise for them, too, the question: what
connects them to their bearers?
The relevant mistake of fantology here lies in the assumption that the ‘F’ in
‘Fa’ stands for something, something that would somehow span the border
between what is general in reality (universals, properties, essences) and what is
logico-linguistic in the realm of meanings (concepts, propositions). It is from this
fateful mistake, introduced into philosophy by Frege (through Plato, too, must
bear some part of the blame), that Booleanism stems. Boolean operators such as
‘and’ and ‘or’ connect what is logico-linguistic in nature, they do not connect the
kinds and universals in reality.
Our approach avoids Booleanism, since we deal with universals, with what is
general, via names and not via predicates, and names cannot be joined together ad
19
libitum via logical operators. Our approach allows us at the same time to simulate
some of the advantages of second-order logic – above all in that we can quantify
over universals – without the disadvantage in the form of the paradoxes which
second-order logic is sometimes held to bring in its wake. Our use of names for
universals implies also that our framework lends no support to the temptations of
nominalism. We are protected from the consequences of fantology above all,
however, because our procedure keeps the logical and ontological parts of our
language rigorously separate.
Our selected formal ties indeed derive squarely from ontology, and logic gives
us no clue as to what these formal ties should be. To establish the appropriate list
requires extralogical work (Smith et al., 2005), just as it requires extralogical
work to find out what the universals and particulars in reality are.
Acknowledgements
The present paper was written under the auspices of the Wolfgang Paul Program of the Alexander
von Humboldt Foundation, the Network of Excellence in Semantic Interoperability and Data
Mining in Biomedicine of the European Union, and the project “Forms of Life” sponsored by the
Volkswagen Foundation. Thanks are due also to Maureen Donnelly, Michael Gorman, Ingvar
Johansson, Chris Menzel, Kevin Mulligan, Fabian Neuhaus and Chris Partridge for helpful
comments.
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